Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[Connor]

Well, I think the main issue is that they won’t give healers anything to do during downtime other than DPS, which, is never really going to be ‘fun’ because healers can’t have full DPS rotations because of balance. And with healing oGCDs being ridiculously overpowered, you have basically no uptime required on gcd healing spells. Which means more downtime, and SE is just like ‘lol just DPS harder’.

I love healing, but it feels like chasing dragons. You get that one party where everyone is like asleep or something. You’re having to cast Raises, keep the party healed, use both GCD and oGCDs and be strategic with positioning, how you use your spells, what you’re weaving and what you’re weaving with, maximising uptime on DoTs, look for opportunities to use filler attack spells. But then you try the fight again and everyone has better gear this time. They don’t die anymore, and their shiney new gear makes their HP and defense much higher, so they can survive attacks with less healing/mitigation that before. You’re no longer using any GCDs on healing, and it becomes gradually replaced by DPS spells.

If you ask me, but I don’t think there’s any point in the healing role existing if they just make us DPS in a green skin, which isn’t far off what we are now, just with extremely simplistic rotations. I’d much rather see healers get support options to use during downtime. Best provisional idea i have as an example would be adding the spells into the role skills like ‘Bravery’, ‘Haste’, ‘Protect (PvP version)’. Give them standard gcd cast time, 400 MP cost and like 30 second duration. And I’m not saying that having a ‘DPS healer’ job would be wrong somehow, because they should cater to every playstyle, but right now there’s only one that’s acceptable because of the game’s design, and it’s the DPS healer playstyle. I don’t think that kind of playstyle should be a baseline for healers; they should have the healing kits as the baseline then split off into DPS / support / mitigation / etc, rather than having the one kind for all of them.

I guess what I mean is, the DPS kits for healers are just basic direct damage and damage over time, and I think it’d make healers much more fun if there was some sort of interaction with the healing kits. I mean, if they want the DPS healer playstyle as the baseline surely we should have more interesting attack spells that have some interaction with our healing kits, like if Malefic IV inflicted Slow or Glare inflicted Blind (not very worthwhile status effects but just examples to try and make what I mean make sense lol)

Basically my issue is that we have nothing to do during the huge amounts of healer downtime we get but SE just tries to cover it up by slapping DPS spells on healers, reducing and then homogenising the spells instead of making the healing mechanics fun and engaging or allowing healers to contribute in a meaningful way outside of DPS spam. Or maybe a better way to say it would be, my issue with healers is that the whole DPS thing is just a cover up developers are using for how easy and weirdly uninvolved healing. And it’s compounded by the fact that if you’d prefer a different healer playstyle, you don’t have any real options without becoming a huge detriment to your party

Tl;dr: my issue with healers is that they aren’t giving us enough interesting abilities beyond ‘small heal, big heal, filler attack, DoT, etc’

[tesni_g]

I would love some GCD spells like that but I can see immediately why they are hard to implement. Either the buff will be a waste of a GCD, and no one will use it (Break, wasn't it?), or the buff will be strong enough to justify its use, and then it becomes part of the rotation (with the MNK complaining about either getting the haste or not getting bravery). It becomes necessary instead of bonus. I think maintaining 4 GCD buffs on different players, refreshed every thirty seconds, sounds like a nightmare.

So that leaves us, again and always, with the Green DPS icon. So long as there are enrage timers, there will be healers trying to beat it. So long as fights progressively get harder/mechanic intense the longer they go on, there will be healers trying to prevent mechanics with optimized nuking. This game is designed so that spamming Broil will almost always be in mine and my groups' best interest.

Since I can't imagine the game being redesigned (again) from the ground up, the only solutions I can think of to deal with the fights we have is more complex DPS for healers. I understand that a lot of healers want to heal more than they do, I am disappointed too at how little healing is required (despite the million different ways to heal that we have been given, talk about false expectation).

I'm not calling for a full rotation, by any means. Just one mechanic. Something to watch for. A reason to cast Ruin II and Fluid Aura. Like, casting Broil has a chance to proc a special Ruin II (which would crazy help with weaving). Or casting Glare gives a stackable buff (up to 3, say) that can be consumed with a special Fluid Aura. Something to work toward that would be easy enough to manage when things are going well but also set aside when things don't--if those stacks and procs had a long enough duration that they would be available after a burst of healing. Healers who don't want to deal damage aren't punished by these additions, and healers who want to optimize have something to build/fish in the thirty seconds between fight mechanics.

There's too much healing downtime. And this is not a problem they can fix into design of the next Savage tier--that ignores the fundamental problem for the first 79 levels.

There's too much healing downtime. Nerfing our skills and heals to the point that spamming is required won't fix the problem, either, because that's too unfriendly to DF content. We already have people complaining about healers that "let" someone drop below 60%--I can imagine the storm of cries because the healer couldn't heal a player with 3 vuln stacks back up to full in two GCDs. We can't fix mistakes if we have to spam the tank just to keep up, and I believe that this paradigm (godlike healing power for maximum forgivability in leveling content) is here to stay.

With that in mind, give me something meaningful to do between bursts of divinity.